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Using WiFi, Nepal village goes online

19 February 2009

Gaia Vince

Once without a telephone line and in the grip of insurgency, a remote village in western Nepal stands transformed. A local visionary's efforts with a home-WiFi kit and solar-powered relay station have e-connected Nangi with the rest of the region to provide people better education, healthcare and income.

Nangi, Nepal: There is no
road to Nangi. Reaching this remote mountain village in western Nepal
involves a full day's hike up near vertical paths from the nearest
town, Beni. I set off at first light with my guide, Mahabir Pun, a
former teacher from Nangi, and it's not long before my pack is
straining my shoulders and my legs are complaining.

Image credits: Nepal Wireless / A wireless relay station in a remote part of Nepal

We see no other Westerners, just local
people commuting up and down between villages, and traders carrying
impossibly large baskets of oranges from the higher slopes to the
markets below.

As we climb, stopping frequently to rest and admire the view while
snacking on peanuts and sweet oranges, we chat in panting bursts.

Mahabir, something of a celebrity in
these parts, despite his grubby outfit and self-effacing manner, tells
me about his lifelong quest to transform his tribe's villages through
the unlikely medium of WiFi.

Nangi village, home to around 800 people, has no telephone line or
cell phone receptivity. Most of its residents are subsistence vegetable
farmers, yak herders, and those who leave to seek their fortune as
Gurkha soldiers.

Mahabir first used a pen and paper in seventh grade, at age 13, and
a textbook in eighth grade; he knew he wanted better for himself and
for his village. It took two years of writing daily application letters
to universities and institutes in America before he was finally
accepted with full scholarship on a degree course at the University of
Nebraska in Kearney.

Changemaker

"I knew I wanted to change things in our villages. I wanted to bring
an income in and better education and medical facilities," he says.
Twenty-odd years after arriving in America, he returned to Nangi with
his dream and an equally important folio of contacts.

Image credits: Nepal Wireless / Mahabir Pun

Our short walk is sprinkled with smiles
and greetings—everyone is glad to see Mahabir. At the far side of a
rectangular patch of mud that serves as the football pitch and general
assembly area for the Pun tribe is a row of low, wooden school huts.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but this gleaming array of
computers and monitors flanking both long walls is a pretty startling
sight. Children, many barefoot, are hard at work, the only sound the
clatter of keyboards.

More than 40 other remote mountain villages have now been networked and connected to the internet

"You want to check your email?" Mahabir
asks me, grinning at my surprise. At a school in London, these computer
and internet facilities would be unusual—here, they are astonishing.

At the far end of a line of regular hardware, I spot something a
little different—a couple of wooden boxes housing circuit boards.

"Ah, these are the first computers that I built with recycled parts
donated from old computers, because we couldn't afford new computers,"
Mahabir explains, adding that the village built a hydropower generator
in the stream at the bottom of the village to power them.

In 1997 Australian students donated the four adjacent computers, and
people in the US and Europe sent over the rest in subsequent years.

Reaching the unconnected

With no telephone line, no way of funding a satellite phone link,
and with the country in the grip of insurgency, Mahabir realised that
to bring 21st-century communications facilities to his village, he
would have to leapfrog the conventional technology route.

In 2001 he wrote to a BBC radio show asking for help in using the
recently developed home-WiFi technology to connect his village to the
internet. Intrigued listeners emailed with advice and offers of
assistance.

Backpacking volunteers from around the world smuggled in wireless
equipment from the US and Britain after the Nepalese government banned
its import and use during the insurgency, and suspicious Maoist rebels
tried to destroy it.

By 2003, with all the parts in place, Mahabir had linked Nangi to
its nearest neighbour, Ramche, installed a solar-powered relay station
(TV antennae fixed to a tall tree on a mountain peak) and from there
sent the signal more than 20 kilometers away to Pokhara, which had a
cable-optic connection to Kathmandu, the capital. Nangi was online.

Mahabir says he used a home WiFi kit from America that was
recommended for use within a radius of four meters. "I emailed the
company and told them that I had done 22 kilometers with it," he says.
"I was hoping they might donate some equipment—but they didn't believe
what I told them."

More than 40 other remote mountain villages (60,000 people) have now
been networked and connected to the internet by Mahabir and his stream
of enthusiastic volunteers, and many more are in the pipeline.

The villagers are now able to communicate with people in other
villages and even with their family members abroad by email and using
VOIP (voice over internet protocol) phones, he says. Using the local
VOIP system, they can talk for free within the village network.

Benefits galore

Mahabir explains that email and phones are simply the means of
achieving his goal of providing better education, health facilities,
and an income to villagers.

Telemedicine, via webcam, is now linking village clinics with a teaching hospital in Kathmandu

It's already working: Mahabir's
"teleteaching" network allows the few good teachers in the region to
train others and to provide direct instruction to students in any
connected village school. Children surfing the net are learning about a
whole world of opportunity outside of their isolated village. And
Mahabir is developing an e-library of educational resources that will
be free to use.

The technology has improved commerce,
allowing yak farmers several days' walk away to talk to dealers and
their families, and enabling people to sell everything from buffalo to
homemade paper, jams, and honey. And the villages, many located on
beautiful but little-visited trekking routes by the Annapurna range of
mountains, are advertising their facilities for tourists.

"We are setting up secure credit-card transaction facilities using
the internet so that more tourists will come and provide an income
stream to help finance the education and health projects," Mahabir says.

Telemedicine, via webcam, is now linking village clinics with a
teaching hospital in Kathmandu. And nurses are getting trained in
reproductive medicine and child care.

Mahabir, the one-man revolutionary, has still more plans to
transform his village including a yak crossbreeding farm in the
mountains. In another of his inspired projects, while all the villages
around have been destroying their sparse forests for firewood,
agricultural use, and building, Mahabir has fostered a substantial
nursery from which he plants about 15,000 trees a year in Nangi, and
more than 40,000 a year in the surrounding area. It provides the
villagers with firewood and the cattle with fodder.

As Mahabir calls instructions to a guy at the top of a swaying tree
who is working to fix the relay equipment, I realise that development
in these remote rural villages need not be hostage to a failed
government—all it takes is a true visionary with determination.